


this is your bed to lay in

by Ponderosa (ponderosa121)



Category: Southland
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 11:59:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13053561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ponderosa121/pseuds/Ponderosa
Summary: Ben has a lot of regrets about the things he's done and no one besides John to turn to.





	this is your bed to lay in

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tunglo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tunglo/gifts).



> I've always wanted to write something for these two, so thank you for requesting them! Happy Yuletide!

Ben Sherman had the taste of blood in his mouth as he lay flat on his back in the precinct parking lot. He stared up at the streetlights blurring into the night sky and thought to himself: _I wish I could’ve done things differently._

He didn’t mean the last six months or even the last six years. If he could, he’d redo the whole of his life, start to finish, every single moment he regretted up to and including shoving little redheaded Jenny Fischer into the mud in second grade.

Unfortunately God didn’t seem to be in the mood to hand out any second chances, and reluctantly Ben picked himself up off the ground. He beat the dirt out of his jeans, scowling at the small puffs of dust sent into the still air. He grabbed up his bag and headed for his car, avoiding the angry red flash of tail lights as Sammy peeled out of the lot. His hand stung as he dug his keys out of his pocket, and he sucked the blood off raw knuckles as he got behind the wheel.

Two miles worth of aimless turns and Ben found himself rolling past Elena’s place in a slow crawl. Going inside would mean having to hear her worry and pout over Moco, would mean having to swallow down the hot sick sting that came with thinking about Sammy’s fucking face when he’d learned the truth. Ben drew in air through his teeth and slammed the heel of his hand against the wheel hard enough to bruise, the echo of the impact traveling up his arm. He hit the gas before he could talk himself into anything else and as he did he felt almost good about it, the awful tightness in his chest easing enough for him to pull in a deep full breath.

The ache didn’t leave him entirely. It sank down and settled into Ben’s stomach like a bad plate of oysters. He burned a quarter tank of gas zigzagging through the streets and avoiding the exits that’d take him towards the 5—towards _home._ He couldn’t go back there yet, where he’d be a few doors down from all that simmering regret. He wasn’t even sure where he was headed until he found himself cruising down the same street for the fourth time in a row. Before he had the chance to decide whether or not he was going to make the biggest fucking mistake of his life, a patrol car eased up behind him; some nosy Nancy in the neighborhood had seen him circling the block.

It only took a minute to clear things up, but it left Ben idling a half block away from the place John was staying. As he cut the engine, he looked over his shoulder at the warm light glowing over the porch. Laurie’s was a cute little house for a cute little neighborhood. His mom would call it _charming_ and full of _good earth energy_.

Ben’s keys cut into his palm as he crossed the street. The alarm going off in the back of his head wailed louder with each step. Did he really think Coop was going to be okay with him showing up here at his ex-wife’s house? This was going to end badly. Maybe he deserved another crack in the jaw.

He couldn’t bring himself to go straight to the door, so he moved off the sidewalk into the alley and pulled out his phone. A pair of figures further down the way kept an eye on him. Teenagers? _No._ Threat? _Possibly._ Ben did the math automatically, and reassessed the situation when he saw the generator. Phone in hand, he gestured sharply for the guys to get the fuck gone, and when the black and white cruised by again and swung its lamp down the alley to appease anyone still peeking out of their curtains, the pair melted away.

Ben waved curtly and after idling for a few seconds, the car left with the sort of speed that said they were responding to something more important than neighborhood worry-worts. As he dialled John’s number with a shaky left hand, Ben kept one eye on the yard where the men had retreated to, just in case. When John answered with a sleep-rough, “Sherman?” he almost hung up. God knew he should end the call, but he stared up at the sky again and admitted over the line that he’d fucked up. The rush of words felt like they were fighting to get free of his throat, scraping and crawling and tearing their way out. In stumbling syllables he told John that he was outside. He wanted to say a million more things and couldn’t; it was like he’d been running on fumes and there was nothing left. After a stretch of silence where he could hear John’s slow, even breathing, Ben apologized for waking him and confessed that he didn’t know where else to go. He wasn’t sure if John had heard how his voice had cracked like a goddamn kid, but hot tears slid down his face when a rough whisper in his ear promised him John would be right out. Humiliated, Ben scrubbed his face dry more than once before John eased open the fence and came walking towards him with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his sweatshirt.

“I didn’t mean to wake you up,” Ben told him.

“I wasn’t sleeping. C’mon,” he said, and thrust out his hand. “Gimme the keys.”

“What about—?” Ben nodded towards the house. In the quiet, Ben's heartbeat seemed loud enough for John to hear, a sledgehammer crack that echoed in his skull.

John’s gaze jumped not to the house, but down the alley and back again before he said, “I left a note.”

Ben didn’t ask where John was planning on driving to, he just followed along, settled into the passenger seat and let it feel like old times. If only the years could just melt away and put him right back— _If only. If only._ How many times could he think that before it ate him alive like a cancer.

Rolling the window down, Ben let cool night air rush over his face. He blinked slowly and out of nowhere wondered how long it’d been since he’d seen the ocean. He couldn’t even remember. The beach was so damn close and it must have been _years_ since he watched the waves roll in.

"How did you do it, Cooper?" he asked, and propped an elbow on the sill to drum his fingers against the door. Tiny grains of dust met his fingertips; the car needed a wash and a wax. One more thing he’d been letting slide. "How _do_ you do it? Day in, day out…. How do you deal with all the same steaming piles of shit and still go home at the end of the day and look at yourself in the mirror?”

There was only silence for a long, long time. At a red light, John looked over at him. “Well I didn’t go around fucking everything with two legs and a pair of tits for starters.”

It startled a laugh out of Ben, and then the sound wouldn’t stop. He choked on a breath and curled into the seat, his forehead pressed to the cool of the pillar while ugly heaving sobs poured out of him.

Ten minutes later when the quiet poured back in, John said, “I’m taking you to my house. Are you okay with that?”

There were so many things behind the question it made Ben’s stomach cramp up all over again. He didn’t have much voice left in him to say anything though, so he nodded and lifted the hem of his shirt to wipe his face and his nose off. “Yeah,” he forced out. “Thanks.”

"Life shits all over people,” John said, with nothing else to add. Silence took over: an oddly comforting white noise built from the hiss of tires on the road, air buffeting in the window, and the wail of sirens in the distance.

*

John’s front door opened with the whisper of a weatherstrip across tile and inside, the hush was filled with the hum of the refrigerator and the dull, steady tick of a wallclock. Enough light came in from the streetlights and the motion-triggered bulb on the porch that John didn’t bother to flip a switch as they entered. Ben took in the place with a sweeping glance; it was cozy like most bungalows within the city limits, though bigger than Ben’s old apartment and nothing like the four bedroom monster he was stuck paying the mortgage on.

At the edge of where the tile of the entryway transitioned to a sensible low-pile carpet, Ben slid his bag off his shoulder and it hit the floor with a muffled thump. He left it where it landed and moved to linger near a bookcase, noting that John had just about as many personal pictures hung around the place as he did, all of them adding up to approximately none whatsoever. The shelves held random knickknacks and dvds, a slew of books that were mostly grocery store paperbacks with the spines cracked to shit. The outlier was a neat row of C.S. Forester beside a set of LeCarre’s, all of them well-loved but in decent condition. He ran a finger across the lip of the shelf beneath them. “You didn’t have to do this,” Ben said, manners catching up to him.

“No I did not. Guest room is full of boxes, so you get the couch.” John sounded weary, like he’d rather be somewhere else entirely. He made a beeline for a linen closet in the hall and Ben felt a sharp and sudden pang that he hadn’t said much of anything after what’d happened to him and Lucero. Though, what could he have said that wouldn’t have come across as trite. They weren’t exactly close anymore, him and John. Everything running through his head right now sounded like too little too late. _If only, if only…._ A pair of blankets landed on the couch cushions beside Ben, breaking up the circle-jerk of useless bullshit sympathy and half-formed excuses tumbling around in his head.

He fingered the corner of the blanket. It felt just like it looked, pilled and worn to softness, well-used and purposeful like everything here in John’s house. The colors were muted in the shadows, dulled to greys and the chalky blue of a hazy morning sky. He lifted his gaze to John’s retreating back, and amongst all the regret and simmering guilt taking up space inside him came a hard twist of attraction. He’d felt it before, when he’d first been assigned John as his TO—a dirty, needy hunger that’d trigger on things as simple as the way John’s fingers slid along the steering wheel. Extremities tingling like he’d been knocking back shots all night, Ben felt the stupid well up and out of him: “What, your bed not big enough for two?”

John stopped cold, his silhouette filling the hallway. When he turned, the look on his face cut Ben deeper than the look on Sammy’s had. The lead weight in Ben’s stomach did a slow roll, crushed everything he was feeling into something ugly and thin until only fear and raw nerves were left. John didn’t fold his arms across his chest or even lift his chin, but the way his mouth pressed together wasn’t much different than the way he’d looked when his back had been so fucked up he’d been lucky he could walk two steps without screaming.

Ben hoped he wouldn’t say anything. That the utter disappointment on John’s face would fade away and that’d be it. But Ben knew better, he’d stepped in it too deep this time.

“Is this what you do these days, Sherman? Every time you get a good thing going I bet it turns out you can’t _stand_ it. I go out of my way to be a friend to you—driving you around like a fucking toddler until you calm down, and then you’re just ready to shove it to shit all over again.”

“I’m sorry,” Ben said. He stumbled a half-step forward, tripping over himself and the countless apologies he owed John. “I’m fucking sorry, John. I—.”

“You fucking should be.”

“You know, my roommate in college was gay.” As the words came out of his mouth Ben wanted to die on the spot—cease to exist as John pivoted abruptly, clearly aiming to get to his bedroom and shut the door on this whole conversation, but Ben couldn’t just leave it. Not like this, when he hadn’t meant— When he wasn’t—

He charged after John to catch him by the elbow and John froze, a tense shiver in his muscles that said he was a hair away from punching a hole in the wall or in Ben’s face. Odds were even either way.

“Wait,” Ben said, going hands-off. “What I’m trying to say is— Fuck, I don’t know what it is I’m trying to say. Just…shit!” Ben scrubbed his hands through his hair and the scabs on his knuckles cracked and stung. He clutched at his head like it’d arrange the mess of his thoughts into something that’d help him explain the stir of lust and the scrape of terror at the base of his skull. “I don’t even recognize myself anymore, you know? What I want more than anything is to go back to being that fucking wide-eyed boot whose ugliest secret was having dirty fantasies about what it’d be like to suck off his TO.”

“Stop it.”

“You think I’m lying?”

“I think you’d say anything right now to get a pat on the head. I’m going back to sleep.”

“I’m fucking sick of running,” Ben said to John’s back. It came out in that same weary tone he’d heard in John earlier, hollow and brittle like bones left to bake in the desert sun.

“You know, I never thought you’d make it. Figured one way or another you’d crash and burn. Never worried about a boot as much as I did you,” John admitted, quiet enough that Ben had to strain to hear him. He turned his head enough that Ben could see that there were lines carved deep between his brows. The muscle in his jaw jumped and Ben saw the bob of his throat as he swallowed. “I always expected you’d end up getting too wrapped up in the street—go all social worker and get eaten alive. You’ve seen it happen, poster boy, and yet here we are.”

“So what went wrong?”

“Hell if I know,” John said. “Maybe I tried too hard to save you from that. Maybe I didn’t try hard enough. Maybe the pills made me a shitty partner or maybe it doesn’t goddamn matter and you should get some sleep and decide first thing whether or not you still want to be a fucking cop.”

He’d never really thought John would have a neat and tidy solution for him, but as Ben watched John disappear into his bedroom even the illusion of an easy fix slipped away.

He thought about leaving. He thought about getting back into his car and driving straight to the ocean to sleep on the sand like he had when he was fifteen and had run away from home for a week. But he hadn’t been lying about being sick of running, so he hauled off his shirt to use as a pillow and prayed that in the morning he and John would still be on speaking terms.

*

It felt like he’d just closed his eyes when the weak light of morning pulled Ben out of a muddled, anxious dream. He sat up slowly. All the scrapes and bumps from last night had turned stiff and aching. A towel waited on the coffee table with a clean t-shirt beside it and Ben cast a glance towards the end of the hall. The door to John’s bedroom was open and a thin slice of early sun cut out into the hallway. With how exhausted Ben had felt last night, he supposed John probably could’ve left the towel on his face and not woken him.

He got to his feet and scooped up the shirt and towel then fetched his shaving kit from his bag. As he passed the kitchen window, he spotted John outside in the yard with a garden hose in hand. Ben tried not to think about what he could say; another apology or another thank you wasn’t going to do any good.

At the door to the bathroom, Ben hesitated. He slipped into John’s bedroom instead, past the neatly made bed to the master bath. He gave the medicine cabinet and the drawer a quick scan, but there wasn’t anything there that wasn’t over-the-counter, and Ben wrestled with a mix of relief and shame when he snuck out again to wash up.

Ten minutes later, clean and cleanly shaven, he almost felt ready to face John. It didn’t escape him that the shirt John lent him must’ve belonged to someone else once upon a time; it was too narrow in the shoulders by far for John. It could be a peace offering of sorts, or maybe John was still too pissed at him to want to share anything that wasn’t already destined for the rag pile.

Trying not to overthink it, Ben grabbed a cup off a hook and helped himself to the coffee in the pot. Outside, John had finished with the flower beds and was screwing a sprinkler head onto the hose. Ben watched him for a minute, wondering if that spike of lust the night before had been born of adrenaline and nostalgia. There was no denying that Ben didn’t mind getting a lingering look at the way John’s muscles shifted under the thin fabric of his tee, but he didn’t have that dry-mouthed desperation that would’ve sent him to his knees in a heartbeat if John had let him.

“Well?” John asked, the moment Ben slid open the glass door and joined him on the patio.

“You asking if I’m still a cop?”

“Are you?”

Ben sipped at the coffee, too impatient to let it cool as much as he should. A week ago he’d been planning to take the detectives exam, and now? “I don’t know yet.” This early it was still cool in the shade of the back patio, but it’d be hitting triple digits today—he could feel it. Not even a scrap of cloud marred the lightening sky. “I’ll let you know.”

“When you’re done with that coffee I need to head back to Laurie’s and pick up my car.”

“Yeah, of course.”

“There’s nothing in the fridge so we can grab some breakfast on the way if you’re starving.”

John might have been pitying him or testing him. The former, Ben guessed when John didn’t press him for an answer. More shame, more relief. At least he hadn’t fucked this up too badly.

*

Breakfast was drive-thru, hot and greasy enough that a second cup of coffee was needed just to wash it down. Ben was working on finishing off the dregs as Laurie came out to talk to John on the stoop. She cast a glance at where Ben waited at the car as she passed a set of keys and John’s sunglasses to him. The trees kept the morning sun from baking the air, but she folded her cardigan around herself as if it were chilly out.

Whatever they talked about it was mundane enough that John’s body language stayed loose, but there was a defensiveness to both of them that didn’t ease. Maybe they’d been like that since they split, a certain kind of hurt between them that’d never heal, no matter how much they still cared.

“She thinks we’re fucking,” John said, when he came back to the curb. His expression was impossible to read behind the dark of his sunglasses. He passed a pair of keys on a ring to Ben. “Square is for the garage and the bolt, round is for the front door. Don’t make me regret this.”

“How much longer are you going to be riding a desk?”

John didn’t answer with anything other than the same sort of silence he used to give Ben for asking dumb questions on patrol. Ben bit his lip and breathed a huff of laughter for thinking he’d get an answer in the first place. He popped the trunk so John could get his gear, and leaned his hip against the car. “I’ll stock up on some milk and eggs because eating this shit every day isn’t healthy, how about that?”

“Oh, are you on South Beach? Paleo? Maybe you can pick up a juicer too while you’re at it,” John said, not even glancing at Ben as he slammed the trunk shut.

“Most important meal of the day, John.”

“Mi casa es su casa.”

*

The next day he was supposed to be on, Ben called in sick. After that he managed two weeks worth of shifts with Gonzales riding shotgun as he waited for either the other shoe to drop or for his request for leave to be approved. Gonzales wasn’t the sharpest, but he was smart enough not to ask what was up with Sammy. Rumor mill said Sammy was looking to transfer, dust off his suit and go back to Gang Division or maybe Robbery-Homicide. That he was thinking about leaving L.A. for Vegas and he’d already put his house up on the market. That he and Ben had a falling out over a woman and on, and on, ad nauseum. The entire time John let him camp out on the couch.

“Ten bucks says it’s another bullshit domestic,” Gonzales said. He pushed open the passenger side door and eyed the house. It was like every other place on the block, windows barred and a narrow driveway with weeds pushing up through wide cracks in bone-white cement. Once upon a time there’d been flower beds lining either side of the steps to the small front porch, the dirt hard and forgotten around the stumps of what had probably been rose bushes.

“Side door is off its hinges. Looks recent,” Ben pointed out. His eyes skipped to upended trash cans, lots of takeout and pizza boxes spilling out of poorly tied bags. They could’ve been knocked over if someone was booking it out of that house, or it could just be the tenants didn’t give a shit about raccoons getting into their trash. But dead plants aside, the house wasn’t in bad shape. The curtains were sun-faded and drawn shut, which wasn’t out of the ordinary really, yet the hairs still rose on the back of his neck. He stood cover as Gonzales pounded his fist on the metal storm door.

The woman who answered had a fresh black eye, whites bloodshot and the skin swelling but not yet turning colors. She shrugged it off, and shifted to keep her face better hidden by the fall of her hair and the dim of the house. Gonzales shot Ben an I-told-you-so glance.

“Who hit you, ma’am,” Ben said, dropping his hand away from his service weapon as he came up the steps.

“I didn’t call the police,” she said, getting agitated when they wouldn’t leave.

“Well someone did and now we’re here. Was it your husband? Boyfriend?” Ben pressed, and he could feel Gonzales bristling. Waste of time or not, he had to try, but he felt oddly like he wasn’t really here and just watching himself go through the motions. 

“Leave me alone and tell whoever it is that called that they should mind their own damn business,” she said, voice rising into a quavering shout.

A shadow moved, and a kid, maybe six or seven, came up to hover behind her. It shocked Ben back into his own skin, and he felt that creeping wrongness despite nothing worse than a black eye and lack of cooperation. The little girl stayed silent and shook her head when Ben asked if she knew who had hurt her mom. Ben crouched down and asked gently if anyone was hurting her, but she just shook her head again and started sucking on the pendant hanging on a thin silver chain around her neck.

“C’mon,” Gonzales said, and Ben followed before the woman got more upset. For the rest of the day he flew on autopilot. Petty crimes, a third domestic, a former vet who accidentally shot himself in the leg and tried to save face by lying about it. Everyone was lying. To themselves. Each other.

“Work it out,” he tells a woman who didn’t want to press charges against the asshole boyfriend who stole her car and drove it into a fire hydrant at the end of the block. Water was gushing everywhere. Gonzales made a wry mention about how this was really helping the drought, and Ben didn’t say anything as the water puddled around his boots. Did it even compare to how much got poured into the golf courses or on the studio lots? Did he care one way or the other? A growing number of kids screamed in delight as they took turns running through the cascade. At least they were having fun, he pointed out as they got back in the car.

Gonzales gave him that, and they swapped stories about dumb shit they did in grade school for the rest of the day.

Back at John’s Ben kept thinking back to that little girl who wouldn’t say anything about her mother’s abuser. He wondered how John would’ve handled it, John with his soft spot for kids and none of his own. Ben couldn’t bring himself to ask, and when he finally called it a night he dreamt restlessly about those dead roses and that busted side door.

*

He and John had fallen into a routine from day one: John made the coffee while Ben fixed a pot of oatmeal or toast and eggs for breakfast. It carried over when Sammy got his transfer and he finally got his leave. John didn’t ask about it, and Ben didn’t bring it up. Ben didn’t ask about the desk duty either, and John didn’t say whether or not it was killing him to push papers with a rubber gun. The routine though, it seemed to make things okay between them, and added a certain grounding calm to the start of each day.

With his stretch of free time, instead of following John out the door, Ben cleaned up the dishes and then shifted gears to head out to get reacquainted with the city. Hills or valley, eastside or west, it was frustratingly the same. He had no equilibrium to shoot for, no golden mean to return to. The truth came bubbling up like tar, sticky and unavoidable: besides his time in college, he’d always felt out of place here.

On a Wednesday, Ben finally went up to Castaic. Sure enough, Sammy’s place had a For Sale sign in the yard, and it stared at him like an accusation as he cruised past. He couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched all the way to his front door. The HOA was going to get on him for letting the plants on the porch shrivel up and die, but he really didn’t give a shit. He hated those plants anyway.

For moment after slotting his key in the lock he expected resistance, but it turned smoothly and the door opened into the cool, dead silence of the house. Ben should feel calm, a sense of returning—all the furniture was in its place, all the stereo equipment and the art he only sometimes liked—but he felt like a trespasser, and none of the things that filled the rooms seemed like they belonged to him.

He swallowed the unease and headed upstairs to the master bedroom. Here was the disarray: the closet was thrown open, hangers askew and only his own clothes left there, all of it shoved to one side and a few pieces fallen to the floor. He should feel shitty about it instead of relieved, but he just plain didn’t care enough. He never had. 

Ben shoved clothes into a duffel, each fistful crammed in like he was throwing a punch. He’d been so fucking caught up in himself for so long. Self-medicating with any woman willing to stroke his ego, playing at being a big, tough cop when he wasn’t all wrapped up in telling himself that he loved it here with the weekend barbeques and regulation lawns, the cookie-cutter wives, and the dick-measuring entertainment systems.

He looked around at the lie and knew he deserved this. No one forced him to move here. Or hook up with Elena. Or plant evidence. Or so on and so forth. Hell, way back in second grade he’d known it the moment he brought his hands up that he wasn’t doing the right thing when he shoved Jenny Fischer towards that puddle.

The real question, he knew, was why didn’t he ever just listen to that little warning voice and stop?

Ben took the stairs down two at a time. He hadn’t been in the house more than five minutes and didn’t intend to stick around any longer than making sure nothing was rotting in the fridge. As he dumped old chinese food containers and a carton of milk into the trash he spotted the little succulent plant on the sill. It wasn’t looking too great, but it was still alive. He picked up the pot and almost dropped it into the trash too, but at the last minute he set it aside to tie the bag up.

Ben carried the little plant out under his arm, feeling a touch hypocritical as he passed the pair dying on the porch.

He’d never had much luck caring for plants--or for anything else living when it came down to it. The puppy he’d gotten as a kid quickly became his mom’s dog and the cat ended up hers too. The houseplants people kept buying to liven up his dorm room went routinely ignored until they were past redemption. It could be all of these were early indicators that he was selfish or maybe self-absorbed, focused on a distant goal that didn’t leave room for anything that wouldn’t carry him there.

Or maybe his mom loved animals more than he did and he just had a brown thumb.

Ben stuck the plant on the sill in John’s kitchen next to a little terra cotta rooster.

*

On a too-warm afternoon, he visited his mom even though the last time he’d seen her he’d sworn he wouldn’t be back. He even had lunch with his sister. But mostly, in the hours after John had headed off to work, Ben kept finding himself going to the library. It was just about the only place that felt the same to him as it did before he’d become a LEO. The only real difference is he no longer edged around the homeless that littered the steps or felt guilty when they reached out a hand begging for change.

The comforting quietness of the stacks filled with the faintly musty smell of aging paper still made him want to go straight to the section with all the glossy oversized books on space and astronauts like he was still a ten year old kid. He did, once, paging through a picture book that was new enough that Pluto wasn’t a planet anymore.

Today he pulled some classics of the shelf only to find that he still couldn’t make it through a chapter of Melville without skimming. He moved on to rereading some of the books he recognized from some of his favorite classes. The sociology essays on low-income urban communities and gang mentality were harder to empathize with, and it was tough to reconcile the perspective that years on patrol instilled in him. He kept reading though, and the next day brought a notepad with him to scribble down his reactions to the text like he had when he’d been a student.

On a whim, he checked out a cookbook then went back to John’s and watched a bunch of step-by-step videos online. It kept him busy, and while he knew his way around a barbeque, a salad, and a pot of oatmeal, cooking was one of those skills he’d always meant to properly learn as an adult. He wasn’t great at it, it turned out, but he wasn’t too bad either, and by the time John’s next off-days came up, Ben had learned a thing or two. Soon enough they had a new routine that included John skipping the bar and Ben fixing dinner, and when John’s next four days on shift ended, the following morning’s oatmeal-and-coffee slid effortlessly into a few hours of Ben doing grunt work pulling weeds while John puttered at his workbench. Weeding was a simple repetitive task that Ben found easy to get lost in, oddly satisfying when he managed to pluck one out without need to poke around for a stubborn broken off root, and he stopped only when John tapped him on the arm to ask what kind of sandwich he wanted from the deli.

While John was gone, Ben washed up. There was a faint pleasant ache between his shoulders when he stepped out of the shower, steam thick in the air, and hauled on a fresh shirt and clean pair of pants. He felt good—really good—settled into his skin and present. A cold trickle ran down the nape of his neck as he poked through a stack of DVDs looking for a movie to put on for the afternoon; He hadn’t toweled off his hair well enough, the cut grown out just enough to turn soft and soak up more water than a few shakes would take care of.

Ben didn’t look up immediately when the door opened, but he could feel the weight of John’s gaze even before he stood up with choices in hand. He pretended not to notice the way John looked at him before dumping the bags on the coffee table, the places his eyes skipped. Ben held onto the little sizzle of excitement that wound around his insides and let it reinforce the renewed sense of his world tipping away from despair. Even his sandwich tasted better.

They sat through the movie together with the same amount of acerbic commentary as last weekend, but when evening came around John broke routine and got the hell out of the way while Ben made dinner.

“I wouldn’t fire you,” John said later around a mouthful of fajitas. There was no trace of the way he’d looked at Ben earlier, enough that Ben wondered if he’d imagined the whole thing.

Ben brushed away the thought. What did it matter either way? At least he knew for sure that he was still into John. “That’s almost a compliment,” Ben teased.

“Almost,” John agreed as he tipped his beer towards Ben and honest to god _smiled_.

*

The three days went by too quickly as weekends always do. Ben caught John watching him more than once—not leering, that’d be easier to deal with, but with a thoughtfulness that made Ben’s insides knot up.

“I feel like I should start paying you rent,” Ben said over breakfast. 

“Don’t you mean you should sell that fucking house?”

Ben scowled and stabbed at his eggs. The yolk ran golden across his plate, puddling up at the edge of the potatoes he’d fried up. “I’ll take a loss.”

“Since when have you ever cared about money? No wife, no kids, no car payment. You figure out if you still want to work and it might sting a bit, but you're young, you’ll be fine.” John leaned against the counter and looked Ben straight in the eye. It took a lot not to turn away from the weight of his steady gaze.

“What if I don’t want to work and just want to sleep on your couch forever?” Ben said, the suggestion not coming across as flippant as he meant it to.

“Can’t let you do that. It’ll fuck up your back.” John said dryly. He cracked a smile, and then they fell into laughter. It lasted longer than the joke warranted, and Ben suddenly, achingly, didn’t want John to walk out of that door and head to work. It wasn’t driven by lust, not quite, but the sensation veered there like warm honey and for a moment all he could think about was having the cold tile on his knees and John’s cock heavy in his mouth.

“I’m considering going back to school,” Ben said between bites of toast, as if the jam-laden mouthfuls would chase away the heat rising on his neck and hide the confession that maybe he was done wearing blue.

“Hope to Christ you don’t mean law school,” John muttered into his coffee.

“Fuck no,” Ben said. He scoffed at the thought. He didn’t want anything more to do with the assholes he hauled in once they’d been processed, and he wouldn’t have the patience to square off against the kind of snake-oil shit people like his father pulled in court. “You think my daddy issues are that bad?”

John raised an eyebrow and lazily gestured to himself. “Well they’re something,” he said, dryly.

Ben choked on a lungful of hot coffee and flipped John off as John did him the favor of slapping his back and telling an off-color joke that only made the coughing worse. With one last slap, John left his cup on the counter for Ben to wash up later, part of the unspoken agreement that—at least in Ben’s head—made up for him not paying to take up space in John’s life and home.

As John geared up to head out the door, he said: “If you do go back to school, do yourself a favor and pick something that isn’t about trying to save the world.”

“Like what? Sculpture? Engineering? I’m not good at art _or_ math.”

A look crossed John’s face, like he had a retort and swallowed it. He put on his sunglasses. “See you,” he said, and left.

Ben busied himself with wolfing down the rest of his food though none of it seemed terribly appetizing anymore. He’d been toying with the idea of grad school, but saying it aloud made it painfully obvious he wasn’t cut out for it. Not anymore. Could he honestly imagine himself sitting down in a room full of college kids again? Besides, the only thing he’d ever seriously wanted to be was a cop. He was just sick of not being an active participant in his own life. He’d been getting dragged along by the current for as long as he could remember.

He stared at the little plant on the sill as he went through the paces of cleaning up the kitchen. The flush of panicked embarrassment at how stupid he’d must’ve sounded faded as he washed and dried the dishes. John didn’t actually care what Ben did with his life from here on out, he was just looking out for Ben, like he’d done since day one.

“What the fuck is my problem?” Ben asked the plant. It was looking better. The dead and dying leaves were gone and it was less shriveled. It didn’t miraculously learn to talk though. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

Ben nudged it an inch to the left where it’d catch more sun throughout the day.

*

When he had a week and a half left of his leave, Ben circled the date on the mini-calendar stuck to the fridge, a deadline in bright red ink. He’d sort it out.

He skimmed through course catalogs at the library, but sitting near a row of carrels packed with fresh-faced students reaffirmed that he didn’t actually want to be in a classroom again. He didn’t close his books though, and stared absently at the page in front of him for far too long. His notepad remained blank. Yesterday he’d been tearing through the chapters and today he couldn’t seem to make it all the way through a paragraph. Frustrated, he gathered up his things, and as he got to his feet, the library for the first time felt small.

He considered reshelving everything he’d pulled out today and tearing up his notepad full of half-assed questions. But then what would he do in the evening...? In that quiet time after the dinner dishes were washed and John sat out on the back patio with a beer and whatever new grocery store thriller he’d picked up during the week. Ben had gotten into the habit of going over his notes, scribbling new thoughts that’d had time to germinate. He genuinely _liked_ that time of day, and the idea of giving up that quiet companionship in favor of going out to a bar or flipping on the television was more intense than anything he’d felt in a long time.

“Don’t like that one?” the librarian behind the counter asked him. She was young, probably about the same age as he was. A colorful bandaid curled around her index finger.

“What?”

“You were making a face the whole time you were reading,” she said.

Ben blinked. “Oh. No, it’s fine. I just-- I’m not sure what I’m hoping to learn, I guess. I’ve been thinking about a career change.”

“Oh!” She stacked his books very neatly as she processed them, the spines ranging from community development to art therapy. “What do you do now?”

“Law enforcement. I’m a cop.”

Her body language changed subtly and Ben bristled in response. He might as well have just said he was a walking mass of spiders wearing a human suit. He didn’t get angry, not exactly, but before all this shit with Sammy he would’ve stood up a little taller getting that kind of reaction from a woman like this, maybe pressed to see if he could make her regret it, or the flip side and see if it’d score him her number. The woman though-- She simply didn’t understand what it was to be a cop and never would, and if he quit, how could he just go through day after day around people like her? A huge, unscalable wall stood between him and the public now and he’d never seen it more clearly.

“Here you go, sir,” she said, sliding the books towards him. She’d regained her composure and smiled ruefully. “You know, if you want to feel equally underappreciated, there’s always library sciences.”

He returned the smile even as the distance between him and woman settled in him like a chill. “Thanks,” he said, and left chewing on the gristly tangle of his feelings.

Driving around aimlessly, he had a lot of questions for himself. Like what was it he felt like he was missing, what had that spawned the hollow aching void in his id that he’d been tiptoeing around since he was a boot. He circled the city, following the same rough path that John had taken him on when he’d been a sobbing wreck.

Window down and waiting at a light, he watched a kid walk into a store with his cap down low. No extra weight pulled at his pants, so armed robbery wasn’t likely, but the kid absolutely raised a red flag. Statistics on profiling ran through his head. Ben drummed his fingers on the wheel and wondered if he still believed in the job, in digging stupid fucking people out of the shit they invariably got themselves into.

As the kid headed into the aisles, Ben caught his own reflection in the window. _Poster boy,_ he heard John say in his head. Yeah, some shining beacon of the department he was. He had respect, but it was gold-plated. After planting evidence, lying, doing all that awful crap, even if it was for the right reasons….

But the gnawing in his guts he couldn’t ignore made him wonder if they really had been for the right reasons. Where’s the line when it was drawn in the sand and the tide kept shifting?

Ben didn’t look away from his reflection staring back at him in the window. Minus the uniform, he could be looking at himself as a boot. The past few years hadn’t much changed the shape of his face or the way he sat, but the weight of the choices he’d made hung around him, inescapable.

“Quit stepping on your meat,” he told his reflection.

The light turned, and as he hit the gas he remembered the last line of the paragraph he kept trying to read: _Structural constraints and fatalism make it difficult to suggest solutions, and even the most benign policy changes are rarely met with enthusiasm._.

Of all the things that had changed in him, Ben had forgotten what it was like to question things. To be uncomfortable with his own thoughts and spend the time to consider why that was. 

Like that wavering reflection of a man he hardly recognized, for the rest of the drive he didn’t look away from his discomfort. He picked at it like a sore until it was a raw nerve, exposed and jarring.

Later, John didn’t say anything about Ben being sombre, or give him shit about the size of the textbook he’d brought home. John just told him he was going to be moving around a few things in the attic and then gave him space.

*

Other things Ben had forgotten: What it felt like to have someone come home and be happy to see him. To have them ask how his day was and not need to lie or wrestle with guilt running roughshod over the weak voice that his conscience had shrunk to.

Being around when John came through the door was a simple thing to look forward to. John never said anything about looking forward to it too, but an invisible something always seemed to lift away from him when he walked in and looked for Ben. Today, that same shift washed over him and smoothed away those psychic wrinkles, but he didn’t pocket his keys when he went to go drop his gear off in his bedroom.

“What’s up?” Ben asked. He closed his laptop where he’d been finishing an email to his mom. The reply could--and probably _should_ \--wait. She was going on about his father again and suggesting they have dinner together, something Ben couldn’t convince her was a terrible fucking idea.

John gestured to him. “Let’s go out.”

“You back on patrol?”

“In a u-boat on Tuesday.”

“Congratulations,” Ben said, grinning. He grabbed a hoodie and a warm, pleased feeling settled into his bones. “Can’t escape that paper yet though, huh?’

“It’s better than handling the fucking walk-ins,” John said, heading for his car in the drive. Ben had to give him that, and grunted a quiet assent.

As John slid behind the wheel and he took the passenger seat, deja vu slammed into him. It faded into something else, familiar and comfortable: the nostalgia of cruising around listening to John making occasional commentary, the heat of summer turning the seats sticky while he suffered in long sleeves, and the idle curiosity about what John liked in bed.

Early on, Ben had thought a lot about it, figured John went for women with thick thighs and big tits. He imagined John to be the kind of guy who’d put something on the stereo and go for romance. By the time he found out he was wrong about John liking women, he knew about the pills too, and John hadn’t figured in his fantasies for a long while.

Of course, John had come around again in his esteem, even before making it through that hell in the desert, before helping pull Ben out of this pit. Sober, he was the kind of cop Ben had wanted to be. The kind of cop that Ben had thought he _would_ be.

“Where are we headed?”

“To grab a drink.”

“Ten Rings?”

“No. Don’t let the rainbow flag weird you out, Mr. I-had-a-gay-roommate-in-college.”

“Hey, I’ll have you know I went down to the Eagle with said roommate.”

“Should’ve known that’d be your thing, Sherman.”

Ben chuckled. “You should’ve seen it. He’d just moved out here and it was his first time going out to a bar. He didn’t even know what kind of scene it was. Just picture it, our skinny asses going in there with polos and popped collars like we were going to be hot shit. I think we lasted about ten minutes until some guy wearing a rubber dog mask took pity on us and gave us directions to a dance club.”

John cracked a smile. The muscles in his forearm jumped as he idly tapped his thumb against the steering wheel. “Well, this place has a more mellow crowd.”

“I hope so, ‘cause I left my rubber dog mask back at your place,” Ben quipped. He shifted his gaze to the sidewalk blurring by to keep from watching the play of muscle in John’s arm. John had a lot of height and a lot of muscle on him, and a sizzle like a flash in the pan went up Ben’s spine when he couldn’t stop himself from thinking about John’s hand closing on the back of his neck and his legs being kicked apart. He cleared his throat. “First round’s on me.”

The rest of the ride was mostly silent aside from John breaking up the quiet to point out this or that. Ben spent the time wrangling his libido back in check. It worked for the most part, but it was hard to say whether or not John thought he was acting a little off.

They got lucky and scored a spot on the street a few doors down from the bar, an unassuming dive that wasn’t so loud that he couldn’t hear himself think. Warm lights and cool neon cast warring shadows on the decor, classic in a way that probably meant it’d hit its heydey in the 50s. It was popular though, full without being crowded, and the bartender clearly knew John. Clad in a tight black tank-top and equally tight jeans, he asked what Ben wanted as he served up John’s favorite beer. Ben went with the same, and the bartender gave him a _look_.

“First Laurie, now this guy,” Ben said.

John shrugged. “You’ve got a certain kind of look to you.”

“Oh yeah?”

John shrugged again and didn’t elaborate, instead sharing some of the bullshit he’d had to sit through today: People with nothing better to do filing complaints about their neighbors hedges, dumbass teenagers getting their phones stolen because they were so high they just watched when some punk straight up grabbed them and ran away with them, all the same ridiculous stuff you get on a day of garbage calls only you can’t get back in a car and drive away from it. 

The bartender kept the drinks coming, and Ben told a few stories of his own, the crap he and Gonzales dealt with the last time he was out on patrol. If this were the Ten Rings or any other cop bar there’d be others hanging on and chiming in, upping the ante until the stories started getting more and more ridiculous. Ben didn’t mind the quasi-privacy though, or the occasional interruption when someone came by that knew John and just wanted to shoot the shit for a minute or two. It was cozy and familiar, and Ben thought about all the things he’d been reading lately: about the meaning of community and the function of bars as a third place--the space outside of home and work that gave you belonging.

“You still thinking about going back to school?” John asked as he picked through the plate of nachos they’d gone out and fetched from the taco truck on the corner.

“Not really.”

“So you’re reading all those fifteen-pound dictionaries for fun?”

“The brain is the most important muscle in the body,” Ben said, echoing the phrase his mom used to throw his way regularly.

“Guess you do have a lot of working out to do.”

“Gotta make up for hanging around you.”

“To being a fucking idiot,” John said, toasting himself.

Ben rolled a shotglass around, the scratches in the bar distorted through a lingering trace of whiskey. “All this time to think about it and I’m still not sure what I should do.”

John didn’t say anything, but after another round of Makers, he dug something out of his pocket. “Maybe this will help,” he said, and slid Ben a business card along with an invitation to move into the guest bedroom. 

Ben read and reread the card. It belonged to a realtor. “You think I should sell houses?”

“Fuck no. Just that piece of shit in Castaic.”

He’d been so successful at avoiding thinking about the house, so comfortable intruding on John’s hospitality, that reality was like having a bucket of ice water dumped over his head. “I gotta piss,” Ben said, only half lying as he shoved away from his stool. He stuffed the card into his pocket and headed for the back of the bar, intending to use the excuse to get rid of the panicked chill causing his heart to skip.

He hit the head and then washed his hands, wiping them wet over his face instead of grabbing a paper towel. His pulse was still racing. Was it the reminder that the end of his leave was creeping up? Or was it the invite to move in for real? Ben gripped the edge of the sink and tried taking a few deep breaths. The lock on the door gave with a jiggle and it abruptly swung in. Ben startled as it nearly cracked against his elbow.

“Watch it,” he said to the guy barging in. The guy paused, but didn’t apologize. He held Ben’s gaze for a second before putting put his hand to his belt and eeling by.

The chill left Ben entirely, overtaken by a sudden, intense flush of heat. He couldn’t say why, but he didn’t move to leave when the guy took a turn at the urinal. He turned and glanced instead, and when the guy came up and made eye contact in the mirror, Ben didn’t look away. He’d never cruised anyone in his life, but he’d cleared out a few park bathrooms on patrol, so it wasn’t a surprise when a warm hand slid down the back of his jeans.

Somewhere, in the back of his head, that voice was telling him he was doing something stupid. Ben reasoned that he wasn’t wearing a belly band--he’d left his off-duty weapon back at John’s--so there wasn’t any reason he couldn’t let this happen. Shuddering and hungry for it, Ben just wordlessly undid his pants to give the guy more room to work with. 

In seconds he had the stranger’s bare cock riding hot against the crack of his ass and spit-slippery fingers probing just underneath. Ben’s eyes drifted half-shut, and he immediately pictured John behind him.

He anticipated what the push would feel like, that sensation of being opened up by something so thick. He’d never taken it up the ass before; his experience with other men came down to convenient handies or him getting his face fucked. He was so hard he couldn’t see straight, and maybe that’s why he didn’t react at first when the door swung open again, this time making contact, a hard jolt at his elbow that rocketed up the nerve in his arm.

“Get the fuck off him,” John said, grabbing the other guy’s shirt at the shoulder and pulling him out into the hall. The guy seemed more into it than scared, and Ben saw John’s gaze flick down to the guy’s naked dick, and then back to him. John told the guy to get lost, and the angry knit of John’s brows smoothed into something worse when he gave Ben a once over. “You were just going to take that bareback, huh? You could catch something here you know.”

The way John said it, he wasn’t being kind, and Ben knew immediately what John was referring to. He’d been there, when Sammy had made a rare appearance at the bar and given him shit over that scrabble in the bathhouse, that ugly fear of _other_ that Ben had forgotten until now. Forgotten because why would he hold on to that--it hadn’t meant something to him, not in the way it did to John.

“I’m a little drunk,” Ben said.

“No shit.”

He pulled his pants back up, and wasn’t sure if he’d just burned his last bridge as he returned to a row of empty shots and a half-finished beer. John came back though, eventually, and they sat side by side in a silence that was no longer comfortable. John had been right about him. Every time he had a good thing going….

Ben settled up, and then when they were outside, he forced himself to make eye contact with John. “Thank you,” Ben said. “For everything.” Bent in his pocket, the business card dug painfully into his thigh. He tried to do the mental math to figure out who he could call for a ride or how much it’d cost to take a taxi somewhere he could crash. It must’ve shown on his face.

“I kicked out the asshole trying to raw dog your drunk ass in the toilets, not you. I moved those boxes to the attic for a reason, so the offer still stands, dipshit.”

“Fuck, John, why?” Ben asked, feeling like he wanted to claw his own face off. He didn’t deserve any of this. He gathered the front of John’s shirt in his hands and wanted to shake some sense into him, to shout at him that maybe if he knew everything Ben had done that second chances were too generous.

But then John’s hands came up to frame his face and held there like he was something precious, something fragile, and John leaned down to kiss him soft and slow and sweet. It was over before Ben knew what had happened, before he’d even had a chance to kiss back, and after the fleeting brush of John’s thumb over his lip, John was stumbling away, already halfway down the block before Ben caught up with him and dragged him down to sit beside him on the curb.

Nothing he thought of to say made sense or seemed right. The cold of the pavement seeped through the seat of his pants.

“I don’t know how to stop fucking things up,” Ben admitted. “And I don’t know why you put up with me.” It brought a sting to his eyes and a quaver to his voice, but this time it was John breaking down. An awful wheezing sound rattled in John’s chest as he tried to hold back a landslide of grief that Ben had no idea he’d been carrying around. John crumpled in on himself like he was made of newspaper, but he didn’t resist when Ben put an arm around his shoulders.

“Thank you for not giving up on me,” Ben said, and held him through it.

There weren’t many people on the street. The few that walked by gave them a wide berth. Quieting, John stopped clinging to him, but Ben refused to let him go. He kept his arm around John for another good ten minutes, until their breathing synced up, slow and even. Until the aching knot in his own chest started to unravel.

Ben felt like he’d been run over by a freight train. John probably felt the same.

“Let’s go home,” he said, and started to pick himself up off the curb. He felt raw and exhausted, like he’d just come off a really rough watch and was ready to put the day behind. Ben stopped halfway to standing, his gaze level with a piece of a hot pink flyer that peeked out from the dozens that had been stapled on top of it. There was something about the shape--

He released John’s arm and John stood up unaided. He watched puzzled as Ben frantically peeled off the layers of band flyers and get rich quick schemes until a homemade Have You Seen Me poster stared back at him. 

“John,” he said. He traced the old photocopy. “I’ve seen that necklace before.”

He explained, in a rush of words, and the fight surged up in him, red and vicious. He was ready to go there right now to that house with its dead roses and busted door. It took everything Ben had to regain control and _listen_ when John told him, in the same voice he used on patrol, to sit the fuck back down.

“This isn’t like showing a kid’s picture around town,” John told him. “There’s an address on file. Detectives will handle it and if they find anything, it’ll be like any other investigation. You’ll forget about it for months until you get called in to court on your goddamn day off.”

Keeping his ass parked on the curb was one of the hardest things Ben had ever done, but that glimmer of knowing he wasn’t quite ready to give up on the job made him do it. If he was going to put on the uniform again, or hell, actually take the detective’s exam, he was going to do it right this time. He’d have to start listening to that stupid voice and learn when to hit the fucking brakes.

Satisfied that Ben wasn’t going to steal his keys and go tearing off, John pulled out his phone and called it in.

*

For days Ben avoided the news. Curiosity ate at him even after he saw the headlines calling the scene a house of horrors, and he finally understood what Sammy had meant about patrol being a clean slate. He didn’t agree, not entirely, but he could see the sense in it.

No longer hitting the library, Ben spent his time working out and going up to Castaic to deep clean the house and box up the things he cared about saving. The realtor told him what he already knew; he’d probably take a loss on the place.

It stung, but not at badly as he feared. Most of it, he realized, was simply being embarrassed that he’d bought it in the first place. “You’ve never been good at making mistakes,” his mother told him, her voice thin over the speakerphone as he scrubbed the toilet spotless.

“Yeah, all right,” he said, and swallowed down the urge to argue. He half-tuned out as she chattered on about this-and-that, finally ending the call when she asked if he might want to come move in with her for a while and suggested, as she always did, that he at least talk to his father.

Ben relayed the conversation to John later out on the back porch, when the night’s cool had finally started to edge out the heat. “Fuck him,” John said. He lifted his half-empty beer up to the sky. “Fuck. Him. You don’t owe him the time of day.”

“Amen,” Ben muttered. They hadn’t talked about what happened at the bar, and it continually crowded the space between them. Still, he couldn’t find the words.

“So, does your mom think we’re sleeping together, too?”

Ben blinked; he hadn’t taken it that way, but maybe she did. Maybe _you don’t need to keep imposing on the man_ was mom-speak for _I’m uncomfortable with you living with your gay cop friend_. “Hard to say.”

“Even liberals don’t like it when their kids turn out to be queer.”

“Pretty sure they wouldn’t write me out of the will, and she’d probably like you more if I brought you around for dinner. How about it, John. Do you want to meet my parents?”

John chuckled quietly, and Ben felt the distance between them keenly. “What are we doing?” Ben asked, and picked at the label on his beer. It took more guts than running into a firefight to keep going: “Should I just keep pretending that I don’t _want_ there to be something between us?”

The plastic of the patio furniture creaked as John settled back, tipping the chair onto its back two legs. “Did you see the way the guys at the bar looked at me? The ones that know I’m a cop?”

“Sure. My ob skills aren’t that bad.”

“Even that shithead I pulled off of you….” John stared at the middle distance. “I’m big, I’m strong. I’d fit right in at the Eagle, you know. Most of them think I like shoving other guys around, because well, that’s what cops do, right?”

Ben felt his cheeks go warm. Sure it was usually badge bunnies looking at him that way, but he’d used that reaction to his advantage more times than he could count.

“The thing is,” John went on, “is sometimes I like it. I _like_ being bigger and stronger. Sometimes I want those things and it scares the shit out of me. There’s a darkness in me-- In my blood.”

“Hey, you know some people like it that way,” Ben said, not entirely understanding the storm brewing around John. He was pretty sure though it didn’t exactly relate to him. “It doesn’t make you a bad person.”

“That night I first brought you here. When you were practically begging for it, you would’ve let me do just about anything to you. You have no idea how terrifying and how tempting that was.”

_I still would,_ Ben thought. He choked out a, “Yeah,” and then, “but maybe that’s something I don’t like about myself either, even if it gets me off. Wanting-- Wanting to have to beg for it.”

He’d never in his life said anything like that out loud before. Not even with the kinky girls who wanted to smack _him_ around. His whole face was on fire, so hot it felt like he’d spontaneously combust any second and fall into a neat pile of ash that John would have to sweep up come morning.

“Aren’t we a pair,” John said, in a way that didn’t invite a response. He swished the last of his beer around in the bottle until it turned to foam, and then tossed it into a recycling pile. The harsh clink echoed in the silence.

Ben watched him get up and walk inside.

He could follow and press the issue. He could drop it and leave it be.

Both promised to be things he couldn’t take back. Which would he regret more? Which wouldn’t leave him lonely and desperate and thinking, _I wish I could’ve done things differently._

He sat there for a good long while, coming up with all sorts of ideas about where things would fall apart in either scenario. It was the same sort of rabbit hole he’d go down when faced with thought experiments in ethics class. “Ben Sherman, you fucking idiot,” he told himself under his breath. What he need to do was look at it from a different perspective and think about this from John’s point of view.

First off, maybe John asked himself what he could’ve done different, too. He had a failed marriage, no kids, not much to look back on and be proud of when it came down to it, and if Ben had been the boot he’d worried about most…. Well, John might not know exactly what Ben had done since they’d ridden together, but he could guess. If he were John, wouldn’t he be afraid of fucking this up even more, too? Of being left alone with all that advice still unheeded.

What was it John had told him at the Ten Rings that night he’d gotten the call from Elena and started burning everything down around him faster than ever before? When he watched John pop a painkiller and didn’t think to ask why….

Ben couldn’t for the life of him remember, but he did remember the look on John’s face, the one that had pissed him off at the time because who the hell was John to write him off as a lost cause. He leaned forward, head dipping towards his knees. Christ, he could be an idiot.

When he abandoned the porch and pushed open the sliding glass door, Ben’s limbs felt shaky with adrenaline. The walk down the hall was miles long and took days. He knocked on John’s door, then knocked again louder when there was no sound from the other side.

“John?”

Ben heard movement then, a rustle of sound, and John pulled open the door. The white of his undershirt caught the dim light of his bedside lamp. He looked tired, worse than he had before checking into rehab. “Go to bed,” he told Ben.

“Make me.” Ben set his foot against the door so it couldn’t close. He chewed on his lip, hand curling to a nervous fist at his side as he added a very soft, “Please.”

John didn’t turn away this time, didn’t try to shove him back and slam the door. “This is a bad idea.”

“I’ve had worse,” Ben admitted. He considered dropping to his knees, opening his mouth and asking John to fill it, to let the dirty fantasy in his head become real, but maybe that’s not what John wanted, or needed. He reached out for John’s hands instead, loosely catching his wrists and pulling them up, towards his face again. “Maybe I’ll be the worst lay you’ve ever had, but I don’t want to regret not giving it a shot. If it’s infatuation, then I’ll know. If it’s not, then maybe I can try to keep up with cooking dinner a few nights a week so we’ve both got something to look forward to after a shitshow of a day.”

It took a while, agonizing seconds that made that ugly embarrassed heat rise up on the back of Ben’s neck, that fear of making a mistake and not being able to turn away from it, but something in John’s expression broke, crumbled and scattered into nothingness. His palms settled warm on Ben’s face and he smiled faintly. “Won’t quit, will you?”

“No.”

Ben waited to get pulled in to another soft, slow kiss, but this time John’s fingers slid up along the freshly-buzzed sides of his head, up to where the trim had gotten his hair back to _neat, clean, and professional_. John couldn’t find purchase in the short strands, settled instead for gripping the back of his skull, strong fingers pressing hard against his scalp. Ben’s mouth dropped open on a moan even before John twisted him around until his back was up against the wall. John loomed over him, and he stifled the knee-jerk reaction to turn this into a wrestling match. His hands fit to John’s hips, lining up perfectly with the taut curve of muscle and bone.

“So you like the idea of begging for it,” John said. The sleeves of his tee were tight over his biceps where his arms bracketed Ben. Light glowed along the pale fringe of his lashes. “What else gets your dick hard?”

Not a single thought came forward to help him form an answer.

“You pick now to clam up?” John teased. “What are you, Canadian?” He hesitated between breaths, then put his mouth to Ben’s, slow again but not soft. Ben got the sense that he was holding back, but this time Ben had the presence of mind to return the kiss. 

When John pulled away, he stepped back too, leaving Ben dazed, his mouth tingling. Ben scraped his teeth over his lip and let the wall keep holding him up.

John straightened up, shoulders squared, and thrust a finger at Ben. _Command presence_ , ran through Ben’s head and his knees felt that much weaker.

“Number one: A bad idea is still a bad idea.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Number two: Don’t ever call me sir. Now get on the fucking bed if you’re so hot for it.”

Ben fought a grin, and nearly tripped over himself as he tried to pull off his shirt and socks, shed his jeans, and get to the bed all at the same time.

“I’m not going to feed whatever dirty little hot-for-your-TO spank fuel is playing out in your head, you perv,” John said, dropping down on the bed. He folded an arm behind his head, and dropped his other hand to the waist of his shorts, where the bulge of his dick was an unmistakable outline.

“What if I need some pointers?” Ben asked, feeling more than a little shameless as he straddled John’s legs and the hard jut of his cock drew John’s gaze.

“You need me to draw you a map?”

“Might help.”

John laughed. He bucked his hips, and gave Ben a shove, tumbling him off to turn the tables and hover over him. Ben had been expecting to finally get a taste of John’s dick, but this-- This was good too.

He shuddered under the press of John’s mouth to his skin, slow kisses that traveled along the slope of his neck to end with the scrape of teeth along the crest of his shoulder. Their legs were tangled, and the weight of John’s hips on his kept him from being able to thrust up and find a bit of friction. Ben groaned in frustration, his whole body taut like a wire, quivering under the leisurely stroke of John’s hand down the full length of his side.

“John, come on, you’re killing me,” Ben gasped.

“Deal with it.”

Ben arched under John as more slow kisses took him apart, more teasing touches turned into holding him down when he ached to do something other than squirm and pant when John licked a path down his stomach and then swallowed his cock. The most he could manage was his hands on John’s shoulders, flexing there in time with the lazy bob of John’s head. He bit down on the inside of his cheek as John shifted all his weight to one arm so he could reach down and stroke himself as he sucked. Ben could feel the drift of his knuckles and the hot press of John’s cock against his leg, and then the echo of John’s satisfied hum when Ben shuddered and thrust and told him he was going to come if John didn’t stop.

He buried his face in the crook of his arm, needing to keep himself from watching. “John, fuck, if you don’t give me a second--” 

But John didn’t, and he didn’t pull his mouth off until Ben had stopped cursing.

“How was that for pointers?” John asked, dragging himself up to lay beside Ben. He sat up only long enough to pull his shirt off over his head and use it to wipe up the wet smear of come he’d left on Ben’s leg.

Face still hidden, Ben huffed a shaky laugh. “I’m not sure I got all of that. Think you could show me again?”

“Ask me again in the morning.”

*

Ben woke up well before the sun was up. He eased out of John’s bed, and left him a note on the kitchen table. He had two days to go and one last thing he’d promised himself he’d do.

He drove through the tangle of already-building traffic to the edge of the ocean and let the sun rise behind him as he listened to the waves roll in.

He couldn’t change the shit people did to each other, not anymore than he could change the tide. But he could be better. Even if that meant another twenty years on patrol.

There were a lot of options, and all of them came down to not letting down his fellow officers. Not making up excuses when he knew precisely where that line was drawn. And if he was lucky, he’d end up like John, doing all he could to keep the new blood coming in from flowing out again.


End file.
